In section 4 Empirical Risk Minimzation of the paper Principles of Risk Minimization for Learning Theory by V. Vapnik, the author says the following:
In order to solve this problem, the following induction principle is proposed: the risk functional $R(w)$ is replaced by the empirical risk functional
$$E(w) = \dfrac{1}{\mathscr{l}} \sum_{i = 1}^\mathscr{l} L(y_i, f(x_i, w)) \tag{3}$$ constructed on the basis of the training set (1). The induction principle of empirical risk minimization (ERM) assumes that the function $f(x, w^*_\mathscr{l})$, which minimizes $E(w)$ over the set $w \in W$, results in a risk $R(w^*_\mathscr{l})$ which is close to its minimum.
I am familiar with mathematical induction, such as in proofs, but what is an "induction principle", in general?
EDIT: It seems to me like the author's using "induction principle" here to refer to any principle (such as a mathematical expression) that allows one to induce some value? In this case, using the empirical risk functional $E(w)$ to find the risk $R(w^*_\mathscr{l})$ which is close to its minimum
The word comes from the way human think inductively from empirical experiment in contrast to deduction reasoning.
As stated in Statistical Induction Principle: